Missing the thrill of fierce global competitions and awesome displays of athletic prowess? Well, lucky for you, these things live on through the 2012 Summer Paralympics Games in London. The Paralympics just kicked off this Wednesday (check out the Opening Ceremony!) and will run through September 9th. This year, the Paralympics are more accessible and global than ever through YouTube.

Whether your favorite sport is powerlifting, sitting volleyball or wheelchair basketball, you can catch all the action on the International Paralympic Committee’s YouTube channel at youtube.com/paralympicsporttv. The channel will feature 500 hours of live competitions accompanied by a real-time commenting feature for viewers in the United States and Canada. Additionally, others around the world have access to over 1000 hours of on-demand catch-up footage of current and previous games, interviews with Paralympic athletes and other behind-the-scenes footage.

One of the most anticipated competitions will no doubt be the T44 100m pitting South African superstar “Blade Runner” Oscar Pistorius against British sprinter John Peacock and American runner Jerome Singleton on September 6th. After making history when he competed in the Olympics several weeks ago, Pistorius will return to the Paralympics to see if he can defend his title. This is a race you certainly won’t want to miss!

Nor would you want to miss any of the action at this year’s Paralympics. If you’re like us, you’ll be tuning in morning, noon, and nights, over the coming weeks to catch the acts of sheer athleticism and stunning heroism that we’re sure will no doubt come out of the 2012 London Paralympics.

It’s no secret that the Internet has changed how we shop for goods and services: 93% of online Canadians use the Internet to research products and services. Combine that with our voracious appetite for watching online video - we watch 30 hours per person per month, according to comScore - and it’s no surprise we’re turning to videos to help make purchase decisions.

YouTube vloggers posting their latest shopping finds aren’t just sharing their recommendations with close friends, they’re sharing with an audience of thousands of subscribers and millions of views. Canadian YouTube partner Beautycakez has more than 10 million views of her fashion and style videos. There are nearly 600,000 shopping ‘haul’ videos on YouTube, more than 35,000 of which were uploaded in the last month alone.

With searches on YouTube in Canada for both “haul” and “back to school” videos at an all-time high, marketers are increasingly incorporating video into their back-to-school digital strategy. Visit YouTube to learn how you can use video to promote your business.Posted by Andrew Swartz, Google Canada

Turn-by-turn voice-guided biking navigation launches today and is available everywhere biking directions are available on Google Maps for Android. With over 530,000 kilometers of green biking lines in Google Maps, that’s enough to go around the world 13 times. Help us add even more bike friendly roads with Google Map Maker and update to the latest version of Google Maps for Android to enjoy Canada’s awesome bike routes.

With our new Official Google Canada Blog, each week we’ll aim to show you some of the incredible videos and channels being developed by Canadians right across the country on YouTube. Today we’re featuring Jordan Hillkowitz, a 10 year-old autistic YouTube partner, whose passion for science is inspiring others.

When Jordan Hilkowitz was 18 months old, he was diagnosed as severely autistic. He didn’t speak until he was five and his mom, Stacey, wondered if he would ever be able to go to school and make friends.

But, from a very early age, one thing was certain: Jordan loved science. And, about a year ago, he started posting simple do-it-yourself science experiments on YouTube out of his kitchen in Richmond Hill, Ontario. Today, to a growing number of people around the world, Jordan is perhaps better known as Doctor Mad Science. His channel has attracted millions of views.

From how to squeeze an egg into a bottle, or build your own exploding rockets, Jordan’s videos are helping kids learn about the magic of science while also stirring discussion about how the web can help children with autism connect to the community around them. For Jordan, being Doctor Mad Science has helped grow his confidence, improve his speech, and make friends in the real world who share his passion for science.

CAMBRIDGE BAY, NUNAVUT -- A couple of nights ago the Cambridge Bay Daycare was added to the Google Map. Then came the Northern Store, a high school, the wellness centre, the local bank, and finally, after dozens of businesses and roadways were added, the old stone church off of Ovayuk Road materialized on the Google Map of this isolated Arctic community.

It all happened in the space of a couple of hours at a community MapUp hosted by Cambridge Bay mapping expert Chris Kalluk and the Google Maps team. It was an amazing experience, watching 16 local residents use Google Map Maker to make sure the world they know so well is accurately reflected back to them on this map of the 21st century.

Cambridge Bay residents during the MapUp

Yesterday and today we’ve been pedalling the Street View Trike along the gravel roads of this tiny hamlet and capturing some indoor imagery as well, so that in a few months - once the images are uploaded - you’ll be able to take a 360 degree virtual tour of the places that were added at this very special MapUp.

Finishing the MapUp

There was a sort of giddy excitement in the room where the MapUp was held Wednesday night. But it wasn’t just seeing places like the Elder’s Palace spring to life on the map... it was the realization that Cambridge Bay - and the culture of the Inuit people who live here - suddenly had a global audience.

Anna Nahogaloak, an elder in the community and a renowned seamstress, captured the significance of the moment:

I think that it is important for Inuit people to contribute to the maps.

It is important for everybody. The land is everybody’s land. We all share it.

Anna’s vision is our vision. And we look forward to sharing her map with you.

Search for [cambridge bay] on Google Maps and you’ll fly to a tiny hamlet located deep in the Kitikmeot Region of Nunavut in Canada’s Arctic, surrounded by an intricate lacework of tundra, waterways and breaking ice. High above the Arctic circle, it’s a place reachable only by plane or boat. Zoom in on the map, and this isolated village of 1,500 people appears as only a handful of streets, with names like Omingmak (“musk ox”) Street and Tigiganiak (“fox”) Road.

There are 4,000 years’ worth of stories waiting to be told on this map. Today, we’re setting out on an ambitious mission to tell some of those stories and to build the most comprehensive map of the region to date. It is the furthest north the Google Maps Street View team has traveled in Canada, and our first visit to Nunavut. Using the tools of 21st century cartography, we’re empowering a community and putting Cambridge Bay on the proverbial map of tomorrow.

The hamlet of Cambridge Bay

We’re not doing it alone, but with the help of the community and residents like Chris Kalluk. We first met Chris, who works for the nonprofit Nunavut Tunngavik, last September at our Google Earth Outreach workshop in Vancouver, where he learned how to edit Google Maps data using Google Map Maker. Today Chris played host to a community Map Up event in Cambridge Bay, where village elders, local mapping experts and teenagers from the nearby high school gathered around a dozen Chromebooks and used Map Maker to add new roads, rivers and lakes to the Google Map of Cambridge Bay and Canada's North. But they didn’t stop there. Using both English and Inuktitut, one of Nunavut’s official languages, they added the hospital, daycare, a nine-hole golf course, a territorial park and, finally, the remnants of an ancient Dorset stone longhouse which pre-dates Inuit culture.

Catherine Moats, a member of the Google Map Maker Team, working with Chris Kalluk and others at the Community Map Up.

Now we’re pedaling the Street View trike around the gravel roads of the hamlet and using a tripod—the same used to capture business interiors—to collect imagery of these amazing places. We’ll train Chris and others in the community to use some of this equipment so they can travel to other communities in Nunavut and continue to build the most comprehensive and accurate map of Canada’s Arctic. As Chris put it to us, “This is a place with a vast amount of local knowledge and a rich history. By putting these tools in the hands of our people, we will tell Nunavut’s story to the world.”

The Street View Trike collecting imagery of Cambridge Bay.

So stay tuned, world. We look forward to sharing with you the spectacular beauty and rich culture of Canada’s Arctic—one of the most isolated places on the planet that will soon be, thanks to the people of Cambridge Bay, just a click away.

Thinking back to 2002, there was no such thing as Gmail or YouTube, your mobile phone—if you had one—generally just made phone calls, and "social media" was a phrase that didn’t mean anything to most people. Less than two-thirds of Canadian households had an Internet connection, we were still eight years away from the Vancouver Olympics, and the Toronto Maple Leafs were, well, in the hunt for a Stanley Cup. (Not all things change.)

What a lot of people may not realize is how, over this time, Canada has had a hand in many of the products Canadians love—from the Chrome browser to Gmail for Mobile—or how Canadians themselves are gaining global recognition for the amazing things they're doing on the web, whether they're launching a music career, making us laugh, or discovering new ways to reach out and inspire others online.

We'll be using this blog to share some of these stories from Canada and about Canadians, to make announcements about Google products and events, and to share a glimpse of life at Google in Canada. We’re going to keep it informal, even a little bit fun, with many different Canooglers—Canadian Googlers—posting to the blog.

Most importantly, we hope to hear from you. Send us your feedback on our Google+ page and let us know how we’re doing and what you’d like to know more about.

Here’s to discovering what the next 10 years have in store, and stay tuned for an exciting week ahead!